Messrs. Charles Knight, of Pall Mall,
East, and Henry Colburn, of Conduit-street, have
announced for publication a portion of Lord Byron’s
Letters, being his correspondence with Mr. R. C. Dallas.
An injunction, however, as such of our readers as take any interest in such matters, of course
know, has been obtained against their publication from the Vice-Chancellor; some hopes are
entertained that Lord Eldon will reverse the proceedings of
his Sub,

As one of Knight’s poets—young Mackworth
Praed—sung on a different occasion in his own magazine.

The volume contained an immensity of the chaff of Dallas himself—for the poor animal, for whose opinions, or res gestæ, no living being cares the scrapings of a
chamber-pan, deemed his letters of so much importance as to have thrown them in to swell the
correspondence. It was, nevertheless, an unwise plan, for the reviews and the magazines would
have infallibly extracted all Lord Byron’s letters,
and thereby left the book a complete caput mortuum,
containing nothing but the vapid residuum of the epistles of Dallas. His
lordship, it is well known, had not the highest possible opinion of his correspondent’s
powers, as is evident from the following epigram, which, though current enough in conversation, has never, we believe, got
into print.

To a friend who observed that Mr. Dallas
looked particularly sapient on a certain occasion—

This same propensity to make free with his friends is said to be the occasion of
the suppression of his letters; for, if we may believe the newspapers, Hobhouse’s interference arose from his alarm lest they
should contain, as they happened to do, any remarks in no wise complimentary to himself. If
this be the case, it does not speak much in praise of Hobhouse’s
anxiety for the Liberty of the Press. Henceforward, if we hear him speaking in defence of that
great principle, we must infallibly be tempted to exclaim, in the language of John Wilson Croker’s clever lines—

Hobbouse knows, to be sure, that he was in prose and
verse, and, in common conversation, one of Lord
Byron’s most constant butts.*

* Would any of our correspondents be able to favor us with Lord Byron’sSong on Hobhouse, written about 1819? We heard it sung
somewhere about that time in Paris, by a gentleman who had a copy, and did every justice to
his subject. We cannot trust a memory which is

42

Lord Byron’s Letters.

We advert to the subject merely because several letters of his lordship have been
placed in our hands, with unlimited power of publication—but we refrain from so doing, through
delicate motives, until it be legally ascertained, whether this new doctrine, so unexpectedly
advanced by Mr. Hobhouse’s lawyers, be correct or
not. In the mean time we may as well mention, for the benefit of those concerned, that some of
them go back so far as 1816, when his lordship was in his seventeenth year, and continue till
about 1815, the period of his marriage. There are some very strange domestic scenes narrated,
and some still stranger adverted to, the nature of which we do not feel ourselves at liberty,
for the present, to disclose. The critical reader may be
pleased to know, that from them much light may be thrown upon some of his lordship’s
poems—Manfred, for instance; one of the
ablest of the critics of that powerful composition,
complains that* “a sense of
imperfection, incompleteness, and confusion, accompanies the mind throughout the perusal of
the poem, owing either to some failure on the part of the poet, or to the inherent mystery
of the subject;” and, of course, the admirers of Lord
Byron’s genius would be quite pleased at having every effort made to
remedy such defects.

Next month, it is probable—we shall not say certain—that
we may speak more largely on this interesting subject.

unusually treacherous to give a correct copy of the
words—but we have the melody still floating in our ears. It ran—something thus:

We do not vouch for our specimen being correct, but we certainly shall be
answerable for its likeness. If any of our correspondents, as we
have already said, possess a copy, by forwarding it to us, he may be sure of its speedy
appearance. In so saying, we disclaim any dislike to Hobbouse, who is a very fair public man indeed, and very deservedly
respected by all who know him; but we have always had a great affection for preserving the
little effusions of men of genius, which, nobis
judicibus, tend to mark the author’s character even more than
studied and formal compositions.

Henry Colburn (1785-1855)
English publisher who began business about 1806; he co-founded the New
Monthly Magazine in 1814 and was publisher of the Literary
Gazette from 1817.

John Wilson Croker (1780-1857)
Secretary of the Admiralty (1810) and writer for the Quarterly
Review; he edited an elaborate edition of Boswell's Life of
Johnson (1831).

Robert Charles Dallas (1754-1824)
English poet, novelist, and translator who corresponded with Byron. His sister Charlotte
Henrietta Dallas (d. 1793) married Captain George Anson Byron (1758-1793); their son George
Anson Byron (1789-1868) inherited Byron's title in 1824.

John Cam Hobhouse, baron Broughton (1786-1869)
Founder of the Cambridge Whig Club; traveled with Byron in the orient, radical MP for
Westminster (1820); Byron's executor; after a long career in politics published Some Account of a Long Life (1865) later augmented as Recollections of a Long Life, 6 vols (1909-1911).

Charles Knight (1791-1873)
London publisher, originally of Windsor where he produced The
Etonian; Dallas's Recollections of Lord Byron was one of
his first ventures. He wrote Passages of a Working Life during half a
Century, 3 vols (1864-65).

John Wilson [Christopher North] (1785-1854)
Scottish poet and Tory essayist, the chief writer for the “Noctes Ambrosianae” in Blackwood's Magazine and professor of moral philosophy at Edinburgh
University (1820).

Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine. (1817-1980). Begun as the Edinburgh Monthly Magazine, Blackwood's assumed the name of its proprietor, William Blackwood after the sixth
number. Blackwood was the nominal editor until 1834.